On August 16, the Thai National Assembly elected Ms. Paetongtarn Shinawatra as the new Prime Minister. At the age of 37, she is the youngest Prime Minister in the country's history. In addition, she is also the third member of the Shinawatra family to become Prime Minister in the past two decades. The other two are her father, Thaksin, and her aunt, Yingluck.

Most of Ms. Paetongtarn’s professional experience since 2011 has been tied to the family business empire. She owns stakes in real estate, hotel and telecommunications businesses.

Bloomberg reported that she is the largest shareholder in real estate trading house SC Asset with a 28.5% stake worth about 5.2 billion baht ($152 million). Under the law, she must give up her business role and comply with shareholding rules before taking office .

tan thu tuong thailand.png
New Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra. Photo: Xinhua

According to Bloomberg , the Shinawatra family’s fortune originated in an ancestral silk business. During his 14 years in the police force, Thaksin ventured into silk retail, cinemas, real estate and computer rentals – without much success – before becoming wealthy during the technology boom of the 1980s and 1990s.

He is the founder of many businesses in the fields of mobile, pay-TV cable, data networks, satellite. At its peak, Shin Corporation – now renamed Intouch Holdings – owned the network operator AIS and the satellite company Shin Satellite (now Thaicom). Ms. Yingluck was CEO of AIS. The Shinawatra family later sold Shin Corp to Singaporean investment company Temasek in 2006.

In 2014, AIS had to issue a press release and send text messages to customers confirming that it was no longer related to the Shinawatra family. “Mr. Thaksin and his family sold all shares in the company on January 23, 2006, and have no connection with the company since then.” The announcement was made after some Thai people returned their SIM cards and stopped using the network service. On May 7, 2014, the Thai Constitutional Court decided to remove Prime Minister Yingluck from office.

AIS is the largest mobile network operator in Thailand with over 45.7 million subscribers as of September 2022. Founded in 1986, it was the first company to introduce mobile services in the country. Today, AIS provides a wide range of telecommunications services, including fixed and mobile, broadband Internet, and digital television. In addition to traditional mobile services, it also offers value-added services such as AIS Play and AIS Music Store.

AIS has the largest 5G network in Thailand, covering more than 95% of the country. AIS also holds the most spectrum across low, mid and high bands, totaling more than 1,460MHz. The operator has about 9 million 5G subscribers, accounting for nearly 20% of the total customer base.

At the MWC 2024 Conference, AIS Deputy General Director Mark Chong Chin Kok shared that building a 5G network is not about winning the No. 1 position, but about knowing how to use and make money from it. To do this, AIS has divided customers into many segments and charged fees based on the desired needs of each group.

In addition to simple plans, AIS also offers on-demand broadband and three modes. Through the AIS app, customers can choose between “boost” mode for much faster download speeds, “live” mode for uploading content to social networks like TikTok, and “game” mode for gamers. The result of these efforts is an increase in average revenue per user (ARPU) of 5G subscribers of about 10-15%.

For enterprise customers, AIS also develops diverse usage scenarios. One of them is the Paragon Platform. It is a multi-cloud orchestration platform that orchestrates workloads across multiple clouds.

(Synthetic)